Character encoding specifies mappings from a character set to the integer numbers that represent the characters on a computer.

To read a CFM page, process information, and decode Form and URL variables, ColdFusion uses, by default, the character encoding specified by the Java default locale variable.

For example, if the ColdFusion MX server computer’s Java default locale is set to French(Standard), ColdFusion uses the character encoding for that locale, ISO-8859-1, to read pages and process information. It uses the UTF-8 character encoding for output.

For each of these operations, you can override the character encoding default for a page, as the following sections explain.